Strategic uncertainty has become the baseline condition under which global politics and economics operate. Power is more dispersed, trust more fragile and stability more conditional than at any time since the end of the Cold War. This landscape begins with the structure of power. The international system has not settled into a stable multipolar balance, but into a form of strategic multipolarity defined by fluid alignments. The US–China rivalry remains central, yet it no long

For much of the twentieth century, the United States cast itself as the world’s chief of laissez-faire economics. From Bretton Woods  to...